If you’ve traveled the inland route to Palm Springs, you’ve passed through Anza. Seventy-five miles northeast of San Diego, 35 miles southwest of Palm Springs. Acres upon acres of wide open grass land, hard by more countryside.

Population: 3,014.

This is where Nick Nuciforo, 54, calls home and has pretty much all his life. His 2½-acre spread sits barely half a mile from where he was raised.

He owns 13 bulls. Nuciforo’s modest home, a bull-riding arena, pens and work shop where he stores hay are squeezed on the hard-scrabble 2½ acres.

Says Nuciforo: “I’m the little guy.”

Yes, he is. Nuciforo stands 5 feet, 6 inches, weighs 115 pounds and talks with a high-pitched twang. Like many bull contractors, he once rode the animals, his right hand squeezing the rope, the left flying about.

But a rider’s career comes with an expiration date, all those back-first, head-first, face-first splatterings exacting a toll. Last November, Nuciforo underwent an 18-hour surgery, 202 screws and two 22-inch plates installed from shoulder blades to posterior.

“The only thing I can bend is my hip,” he says.

What with a trailer setting him back $30,000, a $60,000 pickup, diesel fuel costing $5 a gallon, hay, feed, ranch repairs and vet bills, Nuciforo says he hasn’t profited a dime since taking up the game in 2001.

To stay afloat, he sells cows to slaughter.

But strike the lottery by grooming a champion bull and there’s the potential to earn $500,000 in semen sales alone.

Asked why he raises bucking bulls if after 12 years he’s still not turning a profit, Nuciforo blurts out, “ ’Cause I like it. I’m too dumb to do anything else.”

But will they buck?

There are challenges to raising bucking bulls. Tops on the list: despite their snarling, snorting, cantankerous image, most bulls don’t buck.

Depending upon whose ear you bend, only one out of three or four bulls buck.

“It’s natural for bulls to kick and buck and spin,” says Cody Lambert, who studies bulls on video and assigns them to the more than 130 events on the Professional Bull Riders circuit. “It’s also natural for them to run and stop and lay down.”

Lambert estimates there are 305,000 bucking bulls in the United States. Number making it to the sport’s Super Bowl, the PBR’s Built Ford Tough World Finals in Las Vegas: 145. Or 0.475 percent.

So if the odds of producing a champion bull are paper thin, how’s it done?

Stock contractors say there are three key factors. In descending order of importance, they are: breeding, nutrition and training.

Bull owners studying bloodlines are no different than thoroughbred owners charting genealogies. Robinson, the North Carolina rancher who owns about 400 bulls spread across 700 acres, says he spends 6-8 hours a week charting bloodlines and studying videos of bucking bulls.

“You’ve got bulls that are out of cows that were out of bucking bulls,” says Robinson.

As for nutrition, Robinson’s bulls consume 30 to 50 pounds of dry matter a day, the fuel monitored as closely as an elite athlete’s.

The hay is fertilized to produce maximum nutrients. The feed or grains are designed to maximize digestive nutrients. Robinson feeds his bulls daily vitamin packs and lines them up for supplement injections every two weeks.

Some owners walk bulls in sand to strengthen their legs. Others look for rolling hills to do the same. Some chase their bulls on horseback 30 minutes a day. Others exercise them in circular horse walkers.

The stock contractors will tell you one other thing about the business. You can trace bloodlines until the cows come home, feed your bull nothing but the finest scientifically tested hay and grain, install an Olympic-tested exercise program … and as the Chargers did with Ryan Leaf and the Padres with Matt Bush, sometimes it’s a bust.

“All these so-called bull gurus, it’s B.S. is what it is,” says Robinson. “I can’t take Ferdinand out of the sale barn and turn him into a champion.”

Along for the (short) ride

On a postcard late-March afternoon – blue skies, temperature near 70 – Nuciforo is attending his bulls. He plays vet, changing a dressing. He tosses bales of hay to his brood, spreads protein-spiked feed, exercises one on a horse walker.

But the main event arrives with Cowboy Mafia. Nuciforo wants the bull tested by a rider.

There are two problems. Cowboy Mafia is in no mood to leave his comfy confines, plus a half dozen visitors are milling about, some toting cameras. Cowboy Mafia appears to be suffering from performance anxiety.

In a swift thunderous strike, Cowboy Mafia kicks a rail that might still be rattling. Exasperated, Nuciforo tells his visitors to get out of the bull’s sight, which is a challenge given Cowboy Mafia’s temper-tantrum includes whipping 360s faster than a spinning top.

Naturally, ranchers and riders prefer bulls with an attitude. In bull-riding circles, rank is the preferred adjective.

But can you train a bull to be ornery?

Robinson insists you cannot, citing the athlete analogy with one of sports’ most maniacal competitors.

“Don’t kid yourself,” says Robinson. “We can’t train a bull to be Michael Jordan, no matter how hard we try. Like athletes, they either have it or they don’t.”

Animal rights groups have criticized owners and rodeo hands for the tactics used to anger a bull. The most common complaint: shocking bulls with a high-voltage cattle prod right before the chute opens.

The organization Showing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK) has videotaped bulls being shocked. In 2004, an Illinois high school prinicipal pled guilty to charges of animal cruelty.

“I saw the lowest amateur stock contractor trying stuff like that when I was a kid,” he says.

Lambert said that anyone caught shocking bulls at PBR events is permanently banned from the series. Asked when someone was last caught, he said, “At least 10 years ago.”

Meanwhile, after at least 10 minutes of cajoling, Cowboy Mafia finally cooperates, entering the alley, then heading toward the chute. All this time 20-year-old Tres Sherman mentally and physically prepares himself.

He bends over, hands on knees, audibly inhaling and exhaling in short breaths.

“So your mind keeps going and you don’t black out,” says Sherman.

He squats in a catcher’s stance, stretching his legs. He jumps up and down then settles into the chute, the front rope taut in his left hand. Cowboy Mafia, who weighs 1,600 pounds (think of an NFL offensive line from tackle to tackle), shakes left, then right. Sherman lifts his feet, lest his legs smash against the metal rails.

With Kenny Loggins’ “Highway to the Danger Zone” blasting from a boom box, the chute flies open.

No more than two seconds later, three max, Sherman is picking himself off the dirt, a spinning, bucking Cowboy Mafia winning that round. In competition, a scored ride must last eight seconds.

“Did better on him than a week ago,” says Sherman regarding his last run at Cowboy Mafia. “Barely got out of the chute that time.”

$$$ in the game

Be it for proprietary reasons or fear of an IRS audit, the stock contractor didn’t want his name attached to the following story.

He said his bull won a world championship years ago in Las Vegas. Across the next five months he sold straws of semen from the bull to owners longing to produce their own champion. Net income: $450,000.

”That’ll buy a lot of hay,” says Lambert.

For the first two years as a bull matures, he competes with a 15-pound box strapped across his back. The box automatically ejects after four seconds.

When a bull turns 3, the box is replaced by cowboys. At the Built Ford Tough World Finals, owners pay $3,500 to enter bulls in the Classic Division, limited to 3- and 4-year-old bulls. Prize money to the winning bull: $250,000.

Translation: there’s money to be made.

Julio Moreno is 60 years old. He lives outside Modesto and owns 75 bulls roaming across 60 acres. One of his bulls, Bushwacker, is considered the baddest bull on the planet.

Riders have sat atop Bushwacker 58 times in competition. (In rodeo talk, each ride is called an ‘out.’) Number of outs lasting eight seconds: two.

Acting like Redskins owner Daniel Snyder trying to land the offseason’s prize free agent, one rancher offered Moreno $650,000 for Bushwacker. He turned it down.

“I was taught by my father to never say no,” says Moreno. “Just put up a big figure. If they want it, they’ll pay it. If I could get a million dollars, I’d take it.”

Moreno’s stance entails equal parts pride and sentiment. He once owned Reindeer Dippin, who bucked off riders 93 times out of 96 outs. But Moreno suffered a divorce and now Reindeer Dippin grazes on his ex-father-in-law’s pasture.

“I don’t have Reindeer Dippin no more,” sighs Moreno. “If I bite the bullet and hold on, I can say the greatest bull ever was born, raised and stayed with me. With his offspring and semen sales, he can take care of me the rest of my life.”

Back in the game

Las Vegas. Neon lights. The Strip. Showgirls. Entertainers. Cheap buffets. The Runnin’ Rebels. Busted dreams. Of all the places for Nuciforo’s affection for bulls to be rekindled, it happened in Sin City.

He stepped away from bull riding at 31 and steered clear of the game for nearly a decade. “I knew if I went to a rodeo I’d being do it again,” he says, “whether it be riding them or working them.”

The man could resist temptation only so long. Twelve years ago he took in the world finals in Vegas and meandered over to Palace Station for a bucking bull sale.

“I can do that,” he told himself.

He boasted that one day he’d take a bull to the world finals. Friends laughed at the little man with the country twang.

“They said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ recalls Nuciforo. “’In your dreams.’”

For six years Nuciforo blindly mated bulls to cows, trying to produce champion stock but with little success. A rodeo announcer turned cattleman told Nuciforo he needed to think bloodlines.

Find a bull whose daddy or granddaddy dropped cowboys on their heads.

In January 2007, Nuciforo inherited $50,000 from his grandmother. Three months later, via Internet auction, he bid on an 18-month-old bull named High Octane Hurricane. Nuciforo won’t offer how much it cost to land the bull, except to say it took “a good chunk” of his inheritance.

High Octane’s bloodlines were rich. His grandfather, Bodacious, was one of the meanest bulls ever, a ballad even composed about him. It reads in part:

“Here comes Bodacious

Y’all just step aside.

Big and bad Bodacious,

takes a toll from those who ride

After bucking his hind legs, forcing a cowboy forward, Bodacious reared his head and busted just about every bone in the rider’s face. Another cowboy got off relatively unscathed, suffering a busted eye socket.

High Octane Hurricane has some of his grandfather in him. His record: 52 outs, 44 bucked rides. The past two Octobers, High Octane Hurricane kicked at the Thomas & Mack Center in the world finals.

Friends who once laughed at Nuciforo called for tickets.

“You sons o’ bitches,” cried Nuciforo. “You laughed at me, made fun of me, said I’d never get to the final. Now that I’m here you want tickets?”

But High Octane Hurricane’s 8 years old now. Like the baseball player who overnight can’t turn on a heater, Hurricane is slipping fast.

“It looks like he’s lost a step,” says Lambert.

In an effort to prolong Hurricane’s career, Nuciforo shipped him to Robinson’s ranch so he’d be closer to PBR events and could buck more frequently. Robinson said the results were mixed.

“It happens,” says Robinson. “It happens to Roger Clemens. It happens to Michael Jordan. There comes a time when they’re no longer Roger Clemens or Michael Jordan. Father Time catches up to everyone.